


No One Broke D.B. Cooper's Fall

by fullborn



Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-02
Updated: 2017-09-02
Packaged: 2018-12-22 17:35:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11972286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fullborn/pseuds/fullborn
Summary: Albert is amused to find out Cooper's full name.





	No One Broke D.B. Cooper's Fall

**Author's Note:**

> D.B. Cooper's wikipedia page is a wild ride so if you're in for a real-life mysterious plane hijacking story check him out. 
> 
> Title is from the Mountain Goats' Rain in Soho

‘Say Coop, how is it that you’ve never told me your middle name before?’

Cooper looks up from the file he is carefully dusting for crumbs with an expression of startled astonishment, as if Albert has interrupted vital keyhole surgery by leaping in and brandishing a kazoo. He places the file well out of the way of his coffee and offending cookie to take Albert in: a man that rarely launches conversations with personal small talk, especially at early hours of the morning. He is rumple-shirted and stagnant with the the previous night’s smoking breaks and dead-shift fatigue. And Albert’s dead-shift is deader than most - it is his autopsy report, he notices, that Cooper has successfully scattered with crumbs.

‘Good morning to you too,’ Cooper says, face still clouded with intentness. He looks like he is attempting some to divine Albert’s intentions through gaze alone: that unsettlingly clear look that somehow manages to see right through Albert - although, to Albert’s satisfaction, the purpose of the question seems to have momentarily flummoxed him.

And then Cooper laughs.

‘Albert, you were going to make a hijacking joke!’ He smiles with triumph, and Albert is caught out once again by his uncanny precision and pleased grin.

'How is it that D.B. Cooper’s been working at the FBI and no one’s arrested him yet?' says Albert wryly. He had collected Cooper from hospital a few weeks back after an arrest turned sour, and there on the medical report, full name: Dale Bartholomew Cooper. Albert had been sitting on that one, waiting for the right moment once Coop was recovered and wondering how in hell he had never seen the man’s full name written down before. Maybe he wouldn’t have mentioned it at all if not for a night long with lab work and cigarettes, negligible hours of sleep to blame.

Albert chuckles despite himself; it was almost worth losing the punchline to see Cooper get there first. A bit unnerving too, how transparent he has become. He shoves that thought aside though as Cooper straightens, now with an earnest seriousness that only he can pull off. It should have been laughable really, but despite whatever tale or theory he is about to hear there’s one thing Albert knows: Coop is no fool. Albert leans back into the door jamb.

‘Would you believe me if I told you I was in Washington when it happened?’ asks Cooper. 

‘Were you hijacking a plane by any chance? Extorting hard-earned cash and parachuting into an uncertain fate? Is this a confession?’

‘No,’ - as if Albert was actually serious - ‘I had just graduated high school. I wanted to visit some of the Native reservations. Spent three years hitchhiking, sleeping under the stars, teaching myself what I needed to be so I’d be ready to join the Bureau when the time came -’

Albert’s eyebrows have arched themselves into his hairline. ‘You spent three years outdoors…finding yourself? Christ.’ Then he shrugs. “That shouldn’t really come as a surprise.’

‘I learnt a lot, and I met a lot of fascinating people on the road, and despite my best adolescent efforts any sexual encounters were far and few between.’ Albert makes a choking sound. Thankfully Cooper is seemingly impervious to interruption from whatever roadside memory he is lost in and continues on blithely: ‘I was with a couple from Tacoma; we heard it all on the radio. I heard them saying my name and I knew with all certainty that we had to find him, not just for justice or the law, but to see the face of the man who had my name.’

His face is shining palely with the memory now, and Albert tries to imagine a Cooper out searching for the man with his name like some boy adventurer, not a Cooper getting into strangers’ cars looking for ‘sexual encounters’. If Albert had tried hopping into some couple’s van fresh out of school his parents would probably have killed him, if not for the fact that hard-earned scholarship money couldn’t pay for a corpse to go to college.

‘We spent four days hiking in Clark County looking for the drop zone. Try to imagine it, Albert,’ says Cooper, doing that misty eyed thing that he does when he’s in some revery or other. ‘The wind is howling through the trees. There’s occasional great gusts of rain that soaks us until we are dripping wet, and the light of the sky washes out to an inky blue until we are walking in the dark, our flashlights pinpricks in the world. But despite the cold, there’s a feeling like something tremendous could happen any second. The ground brought into being by the light of our flashlights could have contained anything; I kept expecting to see a shoe appear in the grass or the lines of a parachute hanging from a tree, maybe with a man swinging in the wind. It was like there was something pulling me forward, guiding me where to go next, drawing me towards that other Cooper.’

Here he sighs, and a sadness creeps into his dark eyes. ‘I honestly believe that if we had kept searching, we would have found something. _Him_.’

It’s statements like these that reminds Albert that Cooper, despite all his sincerity and belief, acts like a certified loon when it comes to things that he "Feels To Be True". As if belief in a mysterious connection between himself and the lunatic that jumped out of a plane into a dark rainstorm clutching his stolen cash could possibly exempt him from the barminess of wandering about in the wilderness. With two strangers. In fucking November. It’s a God-given miracle that he even made it to the Bureau in the first place.

‘But my companions lost interest when the search became more fruitless and the weather worsened,’ Cooper continues, ‘And I came down with a bad head-cold. I find that nothing blocks the psychic abilities as effectively as the misery of illness.’

Albert makes a face that suggests that he has no such certainty, but swallows down his reply to make a noncommittal _hmmph_ instead.

‘They dropped me off to a motel where I was bed-bound and sick; I listened to the developments of the search on the radio…’ He trails off slightly, frowning. ‘Of all the unsolved mysteries in this universe, the Lindbergh kidnapping and the disappearance of D.B. Cooper are the two cases that keep me awake at night the most. Is it presumptuous of me to wish that one day I might solve them?’

Albert unfolds himself from his listening posture, uncrossing and then recrossing his arms. ‘As far as I’m aware that case is open and closed,’ he replies, and reels off the pertinent facts. ‘A man doesn’t jump out of an airplane into over hundred-mile-an-hour wind, in the pitch dark and rain dressed only in a suit, trench coat and loafers and expect to live to tell the tale. He’s a goddamn fool and a dead one at that. Big mystery, solved.’

Albert thinks that the smile Cooper gives him is an admission of Albert’s predictable, unfailingly pragmatic line of reasoning rather than an admission of the verity of his theory, and nearly rolls his eyes. In a way, he reflects, when Cooper gets his teeth in some overblown mystery he’s as stubborn as Albert is in the face of argument; their combined doggedness could get them quite far, if only they weren’t heading in completely opposite directions.

‘Why then,’ Cooper asks, ‘would he have jumped at all?’

Albert shrugs. ‘Maybe he wanted to die rich.’

 

____________________________________

 

Later, when Cooper is gone, Albert is trapped with his own disappearing man that keeps him awake at night.

Sitting up, sleepless, he revisits their theories about D.B. Cooper and the starkness of his previous certainty wounds hims. Where’s Cooper? Dead. Alive. Yes or no.

He doesn’t have his missing friend’s faith to say, _yes he’s alive, he’s out there, he was out there all along waiting to be found_. But the weight of the alternative is too much: that Cooper, who floated so long in his own atmosphere without the same natural gravity that held Albert so firmly to earth, has finally fallen. Hit the ground, frozen, decomposing silently somewhere. Missing, presumed dead.

Instead, he imagines a space in between.

He imagines Cooper plummeting into a deep darkness lashed with rain and spiralling with far-off stars, the noise of the torrent too loud to hear the falling of his body. It doesn’t give him much comfort. But as long as Cooper is suspended between the two states, there’s a kind of hardened, hard-won _something_.

As long as he is still falling, there is time, still time, for Albert to be there to catch him when he finally reappears.

 


End file.
